How Asset Colors Across Industry Affects Cohesive Branding

While staring at an Ansel Adams black and white photograph is almost always an inspiring, memorable thing, monochrome isn’t the ideal medium to make your online brand recognizable.

Color is by far the single most important stimuli to reach the end consumer. It outranks all of the other senses by a wide margin. After all, when was the last time you heard about a successful television marketing campaign driven by smell?

Television only offers the malleable variables of sight and sound. Taste, touch, and smell aren’t really practical variables, even upon a store shelf, given consumers’ propensity to scan the displays so quickly. Research suggests that a given item has less than a second to catch the consumer’s eye before it is ignored.

Colors alone do that.

The next time someone suggests a black and white color scheme for your WordPress blog, rather than a savvy, bright color patina, they may not have your best interests in mind.

In an age where people have learned to ignore external stimuli, it’s more important than ever to present them with something that grabs their attention in a pleasing way. Color is the way to gently attract and maintain attention.

Did you know that different colors represent different things to consumers? To build your brand, it’s important to know which colors appeal to which senses.

Red, incidentally, implies energy while also grabbing attention.

Red Accent Theme

Red Accent Theme is a theme that uses subtle red branding in the header (and doesn’t drag it all the way through the theme) for nice, even energy but not too of an eye sore, since red is a sensitive color to use.

However, if your product line appeals to the optimism in people, yellow is the way to go, while orange implies cheerfulness.

Overstand Theme

Overstand Theme brings in some subtle orange features (titles within the theme, as well as the logo) without being too empowering. A tasteful use of black and orange which- when used wrong- can look too Halloween-y.

Each color has its own appeal to the senses, so know what senses your product appeals to, and color your brand accordingly.

Green, for instance, can give you a calm and soothing feeling. Often times, restful. It reflects the looks of nature and calmness.

Green Stimulus Theme

Green Stimulus Theme, in its entirety, represents nature from top to bottom. The uses of green in the header and image, as well as the titles bring a peaceful feeling when using this.

So, Why is Color So Important?

Color does more than merely grab attention and represent a solitary, basic feeling, however. It increases the consumer’s recall of your brand.

Red and yellow together, for example, instantly bring to mind McDonald’s. Domino’s blue, along with a smattering of red and white, has been associated with a speedily delivered pizza for well over twenty years.

Ansel Adams’ black and white work is some of the last remaining that can still grab attention quickly, but it’s the remarkable images, not the colors, that are grabbing the attention.

That’s because color grabs attention before it becomes a learned, recognized patina. Color holds the eye for more than twice as long as black and white does, and in an age measured by seconds spent on billions of internet pages, an extra second is a virtual lifetime.

Just remember that clever use of color can either highlight or detract from an area. It’s important not to overwhelm the customer with garish boldness, or to detract too much punch by being too subtle. Color creates a certain quality in the end user’s mind, so aim to integrate your brand firmly into their subconscious. To do that, you must integrate your brand color into the entire presentation.